Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (28 page)

The toxic chemical within the extinguisher was carbon tetrachloride. The ichor in his spit would break the bonds of this molecule to release chlorine. His first option was a pair of chlorine atoms: chlorine gas. The lungs of the passengers would fill with bloody froth for a prolonged and excruciating death. No. He would not do that. His second option was chloroform: an anaesthetic. Carbon, hydrogen and chlorine. Where would he get the hydrogen? He reached behind the pilot and took the navigator’s tea flask. The lid sang as he opened it. Holding the canister between his legs, he unscrewed the base of the fire extinguisher. Then he mixed some tea with the tetrachloride and twisted the extinguisher shut.

He put his hand around the head of the extinguisher, where his spit had collected. He felt the ichor mobilise. The metal grew warm. Then hot. If he let go, the seal would pop under pressure and release the chloroform onto the flight deck. On the nano scale, I-Core particles marched to the drum of his caesium-beam oscillator and formed catalytic surfaces and micro chemical factories.

The odour of cooked tissue reached his nostrils. He released the canister and fell against the fuselage. There he gasped and frowned. He tugged a black glove from Commander Cook and slid it over his raw, burned hand.

Cory checked his pocket watch. It had passed 5:45 p.m. They were above Santiago. He recalled the conversation between Commander Cook and his boss, Don Bennett, back in Buenos Aires, when Cook had requested extra fuel. The Lancastrian should remain airborne for some time and ditch in the Pacific, never to be found.

Cory lifted the parachute. It was packed tightly as a flag and the straps were tangled. Seconds passed in confusion until Cory understood that the lemon-yellow hoop at the base was an inflatable collar. He put this over his head. The main chute hung low at his back and the reserve chute was a hard cylinder that bounced against his midriff. He fastened every buckle he could find.

Soon he would slip the bones of this legend – no more Colonel Wittenbacher – and sublimate to anonymity.

He shifted his attention to the gap between the shoulder of Commander Cook and the boxy compass atop the instrument panel. He knew that, at this elevation, the ocean should be visible. But the greyness outside was uniform. This might have been some form of limbo, infinite in all directions. Snow gathered at the corners of the panes.

Don’t spook yourself. Leave this aircraft. Let the dead die.

Cory stepped back, ready to turn, but there was a split in the cloud: a black vein. He frowned. The distant vein did not reappear. He switched his vision to the microwave band.

The clouds glassed. He saw patches of rock and steep snowfields dead ahead. The details grew from the centre like the deepest folds of a white rose: shadowed ridges and slashes of white. The flanks of the mountain expanded like widening arms.

Quietly: ‘No.’

~

As Cory blazed with chemicals that added power to his muscles, other processes enhanced his cognition. He parsed the engine sound down to individual pistons, extracted their echoes from the mountain, determined the time difference, and thus the distance

0.76 miles

between the Lancastrian and its grave.

He remembered the conversation between Cook and Bennett, where Cook had mentioned the

‘whisker off fifty-one thousand’

take-off weight. He looked at the cockpit instruments and saw the current fuel load and engine revolutions. He guessed the materials from which the Lancastrian was constructed. All these thoughts, and more, combined in an equation whose result was the sure knowledge that the Lancastrian would crash in fifteen seconds. It was possible to steer the aircraft, with feet to spare, over the southern shoulder of the mountain, but the required force on the yoke would snap the control rods.

Cory burst through the curtain that led to the alcove. His elbow struck the dishes and they tumbled to the floor, but the sound, as he entered the passenger compartment, was already behind him.

Ten seconds.

There was no time to snatch his cane, which still lay against the window. No time for anything. Cory ran through ribbons of a sweet-smelling odour. Chloroform. He fought to plant each footfall; a trip would cost him everything.

The hand of Peter Simpson rested upon his canvas sack; Sisyphus pardoned. Slumped Casis Said Atalah, his face swollen around his mask, held a rosary. Its crucifix swung against his knee. The forms of Jack Gooderham, Frau Limpert, and Peter Young were rigid and aloof. Chloroform had shut their eyes. Harald Pagh could no longer make jolly. He had fallen sideways, his head held upright by a taut oxygen tube. His time at the piano was over.

Wait
, the passengers seemed to say.
Fly with the stars
.

Five seconds.

Cory grunted as he threw the door lever. The hatch opened onto mist and a ramp of mountainside, surging up to meet the airliner. He took a last breath and leapt into the cold. The rudder swished above his head and, for the first time since Buenos Aires, the engine sound faded. He saw the silk of his parachute spew upwards and fill with air. The harness bit his groin and armpits.

Beneath his shoes, the serrations of the mountain wrinkled. The irregular snowfields were marked with flecks of exposed rock, brown and rugged. They expanded like waiting mouths. Cory missed one outcrop and angled his legs for a bluff. Then a fresh wind swirled. It brought snow and reinvigorated his parachute. Cory banked like a child on a schoolyard swing. His course was reset and the mountain fell away from his feet. He wafted east, downward, into the darkness of a glacial valley.

Turning, he watched
Star Dust
pass into the grey shelf that formed the south-eastern face of the mountain. Cory thought the explosion beautiful. It might have been a glimpse through the mountain of the setting sun. Then the grotesque: he saw the snow below the explosion pucker with debris. First wings, then seats, oxygen cylinders, Penguin paperbacks, a torn canvas sack that bore the arms of an English king, the boot of an airman, a human head. Cory lost his desire to look. The phantom sound of propellers lingered. But a thunderclap punctuated the sound, bringing silence.

These poor people.

No, not people. Zombies. Things with no mind.

The air was huge and everywhere. To prove he could, he shouted, ‘Lisandro!’

Lisandro was already dead and he knew it.

His feet struck a promontory and he screamed as both Achilles tendons snapped. He tumbled, cocooned in the strings of his parachute, down a cleft little wider than his shoulders. Pain-inhibiting mechanisms were tripped before his ribs broke, each snap like a pencil in a child’s hand. There was a pit of snow at the base of the cleft. His head pierced hard, packed snow.

Silence.

Upside-down and broken, Cory heard the tick of blood in his ears. Across his vision slipped bar-charts and line graphs describing the negative trends of his life: blood oxygen saturation falling; blood acidity rising; a lung punctured; ribs sprung; a collar bone detached. The automata wished to squeeze water from his tissues, conjure oxygen, and augment his respiration. Did he object?

Do I look like I give a fuck?

He imagined the parachute folding on the soles of his shoes. A silk bag. A cocoon.

~

In the still moments of his long life to come, Cory would remember that night and its silence. The dark was blindness until his vision slid into higher frequencies. Then the mountain reappeared as great and indifferent as it had seemed on the flight deck of the Lancastrian. A star-filled sky. Away, in the miles covered by his gaze, he could see no pockets of heat: no settlement, shed, or lone shepherd. His lungs burned in the deoxygenated air. Anaerobic respiration stung his muscles. He clawed from rock to rock. Sometimes he fell. Sometimes he slid. The rugged zip on his Irvin held, but the trousers of his tropical suit tore, and his knees bled sluggishly and gathered grit.

~

After dawn, he found a half-buried object. It was blackened and smelled of carbon and aeroplane fuel. He read the words ‘olls – Royce’ on its side. When Cory grinned, his lips tore, but the blood did not leak. He touched the engine. It cooled as Cory warmed. His automata, revitalised, set about their repair work. Ice-split cells were thawed and reconstructed. His Achilles tendons were reattached. New sinews wove. Metabolic by-products were quarantined, passed into the blood, and set free by his lungs. A circle of snow melted around him. He felt the water impregnate his tissues, load them, buoy his life. He reached again and drew a finger along the flank of the engine. Cory stroked a line of soot beneath each eye and felt the distant pulse of the smart matter. Four hundred metres away, perhaps five hundred. He held out his hand and the cane – clean, perfect, undamaged – flew into his grip. He walked west.

~

By the fourth day, he had exhausted the energy inducted from the engine. He came to a valley crowded with ice columns. He passed among the frozen army without a sound. He slept at the base of one and expected to die.

On the fifth, he collapsed against a rust-red boulder on the bank of a great, milky river. He awoke when a day moon was visible in the sky. An
arriero
, a muleteer, was leaning forward with a canteen. He put it to Cory’s lips. Cory knew to take a sip, no more.

‘
Bueno
,’ said the man. ‘
Mi nombre es Evaristo, el mismo nombre que la ciudad.
’

The translation came as Cory watched the white-and-brown hills. He turned back to Evaristo, opened his left hand and, with a frostbitten finger, brushed the leather of the palm.

‘
Tómelo
,’ said Evaristo. He gave Cory a shaving of paper and a pencil with a knife-hewn nib.

In Spanish, Cory wrote,
My plane crashed high on the mountain. Where am I?

‘
La Vega de los Flojos
.’

The meadow of the lazy? Cory smiled.

He wrote,
Which country?

‘
Chile, Chile
.’

Cory vomited the water onto the slush. Icons slid into his vision, flashing, urgent with alerts; his body had exhausted its fuels. The automata petitioned him to kick-start repairs using the life energy of the
arriero
, but Cory fired back a veto.

His right hand gripped his belt. Five days before, in the lounge where he had waited with the other passengers to board
Star Dust
, it had been flush with his abdomen. Now it was loose. He twisted the belt to expose inset gold sovereigns. The
arriero
looked from the gold to Cory. His rough-skinned hand pushed away Cory’s and reset the belt. He shook his head. A stream of Spanish left his mouth.

The translation came seconds later, as though the sound had travelled miles.

‘
I do not think you will live, my friend. If you die, I promise to bury you with your gold. But I am a poor man. Perhaps you will offer it a second time, when you are well.’

Cory wrote,
Thank you
.

The
arriero
nodded. He turned his head and made a
puh-puh
sound.

A horse took lazy steps towards them through the scree.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Regensburg

His last word,
scree
, left a hole in the air, a dead zone. Jem sat with her arms on her knees. She was exhausted. Saskia’s features were shadowed, and as she moved, a new light struck her eyes emerald. Wearily, Jem followed the shaft to a brightening window: dawn.

‘You should not have travelled in time,’ said Saskia. ‘You were not strong enough.’

Jem looked at her. Saskia had been dead and broken on the cot. Now she scanned the room with command in her eyes. This, Jem decided, was once more the unstoppable woman she had encountered in Berlin. She remembered the smile as they waited for the rendezvous with Wolfgang: that businesslike tug of her gloves.

Cory glanced at his broken gun. ‘It took strength to come down that mountain.’

‘You gave up to the mountain.’

‘I did not.’ His voice had a petulant edge. ‘I survived it.’

‘The mountain was not Tupungato. The mountain was Jennifer’s newspaper.’

His eyelids fluttered. ‘Look, if you–’

His words trailed off as Saskia reversed her gun and placed it on the table. At this, the inspector raised his eyebrows and looked at Jem. Hrafn and Danny exchanged a similar look of alarm. Jem reached for the weapon but stopped, unsure of Saskia’s plan.

‘Take the gun, Jem,’ said Hrafn. ‘Quickly.’

‘There is no point,’ said Saskia flatly. ‘No-one in this room is fast enough.’

‘Fuck,’ said Danny.

‘He can kill us all,’ said Saskia. ‘Though he will not.’

Danny looked at her. ‘Pleased to hear it. Why not, Cory?’

‘Honestly? I can’t think of a reason.’

‘
Fuck
.’

Saskia stepped towards Cory. Her eyes dared his. ‘You know that the Cullinan Zero is fiction. You feel it. And you feel my certainty.’

‘So you can control your physiological responses,’ Cory said. ‘Join the club. Perhaps I should remove all doubt by ripping the information wholesale from that little device in your head.’

‘I have safeguards that will lesion the traces before you can gain control of it.’

‘Ichor or no ichor, Saskia, it would be the end of you.’

‘I know. Think quickly.’

‘I have twenty minutes. No rush.’

‘Why twenty?’ asked Duczyński.

‘There is a police helicopter approaching from the south-west,’ said Saskia. She kept her eyes on Cory. ‘It was tipped off by an anonymous caller.’ She frowned. ‘Cory, you’re looking for doubt, but you already have it. Jennifer did not lie to me. How would I know to fabricate a story that so closely resembles yours? Think. Do you have any recollection of your wife on the day you crossed? Keep thinking. The day before? Part of you knows that she never existed. Listen to that part. You are, in some ways, a victim. If you kill us, you do so on the basis of a lie. That I will not accept.’